Stathis Kouvélakis

The Marxian Critique of Citizenship:

For a Rereading of On the Jewish Question

Marx’s On the Jewish Question (Zur Judenfrage)is one of those texts that perfectly illustrate

Hegel’s famous adage that ‘‘what is well known

is, precisely because it is well known, generally

unknown.’’1There are at least two reasons for

On the Jewish Question’s paradoxical popularity:first, it has fed an overabundant and (with rare

exceptions) confused debate on Marx’s supposed

‘‘anti-Semitism’’ and second, as if to accent this

‘‘heretical’’ quality, it has been passed down to

posterity as announcing all ‘‘Marxist totalitarian-

isms,’’ due to its radical critique of ‘‘the rights

of man.’’

In what follows, I will not undertake a detailed

exegesis of this text, which is short but par-

ticularly dense and rich. More particularly, I

deliberately will leave aside all that pertains to

the political and religious stricto sensu (includingthe Marxian vision or, rather, category of Juda-

ism as it appears in this text)2and will content

myself with a few remarks on the second aspect:

the Marxian critique of ‘‘the rights of man and

of the citizen.’’ This aspect is particularly scan-

dalous today, after the end of ‘‘totalitarianisms,’’

that is, after the defeat of the twentieth-century

revolutions. In this conjuncture, the vocabulary

The South Atlantic Quarterly 104:4, Fall 2005.Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press.

708 Stathis Kouvélakis

and the juridico-political category of ‘‘citizenship’’ and,with the latter, politi-

cal liberalism (in its multiple and often competing versions, whether from

‘‘the Right’’ or ‘‘the Left’’), seem to form the final horizon of politics. For we

must not avoid the question; there is indeed inMarx a radical critique of citi-

zenship defined as a specificmoment that dictates the equality and freedom

of individuals as bearers of rights and rightful subjects. The emancipation

promised by the project of communist revolution as Marx conceives it can-

not be expressed in the language of citizenship, of right or rights. Socialism

or communism cannot be categorized as and cannot result from an accu-

mulation of rights or from an extension of citizenship, even if the latter is

posed as ‘‘social citizenship.’’

So, given the judgment of our day, should we resolve ourselves to cast

aside the critique formulated by the socialist and communist tradition, and

especially by Marx, of citizenship and of right? The cause I will plead here

is that Marx has a right to have his case reexamined before he is definitively

condemned. It seems tome that his radical critique of citizenship, his effort

to think modern politics—and particularly that modern politics par excel-

lence, revolutionary politics—outside the figures of right, should be taken

seriously, especially today, before it is consigned to the oubliette of history.

I will begin by specifying that, in the text in question, Marx does not aim

to treat systematically the question of citizenship or of the rights of man

but to respond to Bruno Bauer, and particularly to his work Die Judenfrage.3

Here Bauer continues, with customary ultraradical phraseology, his battle

against the German-Christian state of his time in terms that, according to

Marx, remain in fact theological, internal to the very state Bauer claims to

combat. Bauer thus misses the content of both ‘‘political emancipation,’’ as

delivered by the Revolution of 1789, and ‘‘human emancipation,’’ which,

Marx concludes in the two texts included in the Deutsch-Französische Jahr-bücher,4 had become the horizon of a new revolution. Marx thus undertakes

to clarify the contents of this distinction, particularly with the goal of dissi-

pating Bauer’s illusions with respect to what is meant by the advent of the

modern political state, which, for Bauer, promises the liberation of all reli-

gious consciousness.To this end,Marx turns to themost advanced or ‘‘pure’’

case of the liberal democratic state, of which the United States is a model.

Marx shows that, despite its rupture with the Old Regime, themodern state

retains something of the former’s transcendence, in an of course secular-

ized form. He also demonstrates that this transcendence is expressed in a

juridical universalism, which is abstract and truncated, blind to its own pre-

For a Rereading of On the Jewish Question 709

suppositions and impotent to resolve the questions it poses. The critique

of the figure of the citizen, and the necessity of its ‘‘overtaking’’ or ‘‘aboli-

tion’’ (Aufhebung) in the perspective of the new revolution, condenses the

ensemble of Marx’s argument, which we will approach from a threefold

point of view: the anthropological foundation of the utterances (énoncés) ofcitizenship, the ‘‘abstract’’ character of their form, and the status of right

circumscribed herein.

The Anthropological Presupposition of the Rights of Man

According to Marx’s well-known dictum, the rights of man, insofar as they

are distinguished from the rights of the citizen, are those of the ‘‘member ofcivil society, i.e., the rights of egotistic man, of man separated from other

men and from the community.’’5Marx thus examines the four ‘‘natural and

imprescriptible’’ rights as they are articulated in ‘‘the most radical’’ version

of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, that of 1793, to

wit equality, liberty, security, and property. He shows that all come back to

property,6of which they serve asmetaphors and whose free enjoyment they

aim, in turn, to guarantee. ‘‘Natural’’ rights are conceived on the model of

the individual-monad, ideally self-sufficient andmotivated by the unlimited

desire to satisfy personal needs, what C. B. MacPherson designates as ‘‘pos-

sessive [or proprietary] individualism.’’

Often considered to be a moral critique, due to its denunciation (quite

banal for the time) of the ‘‘egotism’’ of bourgeois society, Marx’s argument

rests on the following: that this anthropological figure of man-as-property-

owner results from an exclusion, from a primordial separation (from the

point of view of a ‘‘synchronic’’ analysis of bourgeois society, for the rest of

the text will strive precisely to reconstitute its genesis) between man and

his ‘‘generic essence’’ (Gattungswesen), that is, man considered in consti-

tutive multiplicity of his relations with other men and with social activi-

ties. This concept, which has clear Feuerbachian overtones, Marx takes up

only to transform it (to ‘‘Hegelianize’’ or ‘‘historicize’’ it, let’s say, to make a

long story short) in an essentially reactive sense.The ‘‘generic essence’’ must

be understood above all as a critical machine directed against the abstractuniversalism of rights, which it shows is unable to determine the condi-

tions, and substantial content, of freedom. Indeed, it is the illusion of an

‘‘original,’’ and of course final, ‘‘independence’’7of man-as-property-owner

(via ‘‘natural rights,’’ whose ‘‘conservation’’ the political association of citi-

710 Stathis Kouvélakis

zens is called on to guarantee), that is targeted here, to the extent it pro-

hibits us from considering the effective conditions of production of a com-

mon liberty: ‘‘This individual liberty and its application form the basis of

civil society. It makes every man see in other men not the realisation of hisown freedom, but the barrier to it.’’8 This ‘‘generic life’’ is thus in no way

‘‘natural’’;9on the contrary, it is ‘‘egotistic man’’ in bourgeois society who

retrogrades to the rank of ‘‘natural object,’’ precisely in the sense that, sepa-rated from social mediation, he is nothing more than the ‘‘passive resultof the dissolved society, . . . an object of immediate certainty.’’10 Here wecan glimpse, but only in intaglio, the meaning of the emancipation of this

atomized individual of bourgeois society who, by reuniting with his generic

essence, makes possible the social ‘‘recognition’’ and ‘‘organisation’’ of his

‘‘social force’’ in his ‘‘particularwork,’’ in his ‘‘particular situation,’’ to borrow

the formulations of Marx’s text.11In this framework, it should be stressed,

the ‘‘abstract citizen’’ is not purely and simply eliminated; he is reabsorbed

into the real individual man; he ceases to exist as transcendental double, as

reality separated from social as well as individual life, which is henceforth

reconstructed in the immanence of its mediations.

Reticent to make more explicit the determinations of this ‘‘generic life’’

that succeeds bourgeois society, therein faithful to his fundamentally anti-

utopian stance, Marx is more committed to showing how the very text of

the Declaration is haunted by the hidden face of the abstract universalism

that it proclaims.What is excluded in the constitutivemoment of bourgeois

society, ‘‘generic life,’’ will return, but in ‘‘alienated’’ form (in inverted pro-

jection, imaginarily mastering its creators), in the ‘‘idealism’’ of the com-

munity of citizens, which will renew the originary separation in the form

of a multiplicity of ‘‘concrete’’ exclusions. In On the Jewish Question, Marx

goes no further. But he says enough for us to decipher the functioning of

the utterances of abstract universalism. For if the ‘‘man’’ of the Declara-

tion of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is the property owner, it fol-

lows that the unpropertied person is revealed to be, logically, a bit less of

a ‘‘man.’’ To put it another way, if all men are born and remain free and

equal before the law, if the citizen can only be that particularman, the ques-

tion of citizenship, and of access to it, becomes: Who, or rather what, is

a man? Is an unpropertied person a ‘‘man,’’ in the full sense of the term?

Is a woman a ‘‘man’’? Is a slave or a colonized person a ‘‘man’’? We know

that the founding fathers of liberalism, in impressive unanimity, answered

these questions in the negative.12Locke subsumes the black slave under

For a Rereading of On the Jewish Question 711

the category of merchandise, next to the horse. He considers the labor-

ing class, and all those who find themselves excluded (even if only tem-

porarily, as in the case of a salaried worker engaged in a contractual rela-

tionship) from the ownership of themselves as well as from the possibility

of accumulating goods, to be incapable of living a rational life and, natu-

rally, of having access to active citizenship.13We know that early on, the

figures of the slave and of the proletarian were linked, that one rubbed off

on the other, especially in the representation of the proletariat as a race dis-

tinct from that of themasters, a vision that was extraordinarily popular dur-

ing the entire nineteenth century. Even Emmanuel Sieyès, author of the

most famous political text of the French Revolution, speaks of ‘‘themajority

of men’’ as ‘‘work machines’’ and ‘‘bipedal instruments.’’14Benjamin Con-

stant, one of the favorite authors of today’s sycophants of neoliberalism,

compared unpropertied people, the ‘‘immense majority,’’ as he stressed, to

minors, who will ‘‘always be deprived of leisure, an indispensable condition

for the acquisition of enlightenment.’’15Alongside the proletarians, slaves,

and other representatives of a subaltern humanity, women must not be

forgotten. Their ‘‘natural’’ equality (as members of a same ‘‘human kind’’)

immediately confronts the insurmountable sexual ‘‘difference,’’ identified

as a ‘‘difference’’ of ‘‘rationality’’ (at least from the point of view of its prac-

tical exercise) that legitimates their exclusion from citizenship and their

relegation to the ‘‘domestic’’ or ‘‘private’’ space.16

I will stop here an enumeration that could quickly grow tiresome: it is

clear that the abstract universalism of rights rests on an anthropological

figure that defines the subjects of these rights and that this figure functions

according to a ‘‘principle of hidden exclusion,’’ to borrow thewords of André

Tosel.17The égaliberté that exists in principle among ‘‘men’’ in no way pre-

vents there being an internal hierarchization of their humanity, provided

that no obstacle of ‘‘nature,’’ that is, of birth,18forbids a priori the passage

from one degree to another, as, for example, Kant has demonstrated.19

Of course, one could counter that it is precisely through the reiteration of

these abstract universalist utterances that the exclusions in question ‘‘gradu-

ally’’ have been overcome, even if only partially, and that the effectivity char-

acteristic of these utterances, inseparable in this sense from the internal

tension that results from their specifically ‘‘abstract’’ character,20has been

deployed.Of course, butwemust recall that this has been anything but a lin-

ear process, that long and arduous struggles have been required, and that, as

a result (as we will see later), the ‘‘reiteration’’ of ‘‘abstract’’ utterances must

712 Stathis Kouvélakis

itself be seen more as their transformation than as their sheer repetition. Tospeak only of suffrage and electability, the postrevolutionary period, which

in France followed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the emergence

of citizenship, saw not an enlargement but, on the contrary, a significant

restriction of the right to vote,21 both for unpropertied people (local or gen-eral assemblies of the ‘‘Estates,’’ especially the Third, had been elected by

nearly universal male suffrage) and for women (some women, especially

among the nobility, had had the right to seats in these assemblies), since

the Constituent Assembly quickly installed a system of suffrage that was

strictly masculine and based on a franchise restricted to property-holders.

The domination of proprietary liberalism (excepting the brief interlude of

the Jacobin Republic) was not a simple, more or less residual or arrière-garde‘‘resistance’’ but the unleashing of a formidable movement of ‘‘disemanci-

pation’’22through the imposition of the figures of ‘‘passive citizenship’’ on

unpropertied people and women and the frenetic pursuit of colonial and

slaveholding barbarism.

As for the struggles thatmanaged to bring down at least a few of the exclu-

sions and separations under discussion, they only succeeded when they

took aim at their anthropological blind spot and at their constitutive abstrac-

tion: by revealing as ‘‘political,’’ and even as politics’ contents par excellence,

those ‘‘simple component parts’’ of civil life whose ‘‘political character’’ the

‘‘political revolution’’ had abolished, making them into simple ‘‘social’’ dif-

ferences.23In thisway, these struggles have also revealed the abstract univer-

sal for what it is, a barely veiled particularism, contaminated by the very ‘‘par-

ticular’’ that it excludes from its field, and which, in turn, is shown to be the

true ‘‘universal.’’ The more that the universal perseveres in its abstraction,

the more it is revealed to be the particularism of white, male, colonizing

property owners,24while the intrusion of ‘‘particularisms,’’ or of ‘‘corporat-

isms’’ (of proletarians, of colonized peoples, of women), is shown to bear

effective universality.25

Citizenship and the Political State as Abstractions

No doubt carried away by the brilliance of Marx’s formulations, commen-

tators have been very loquacious in general about the text’s religious meta-

phors, especially when Marx poses the truth of the schism imposed by

political emancipation between, on the one hand, a civil-bourgeois society

devoted to the pursuit of particular interests and, on the other, a state that

For a Rereading of On the Jewish Question 713

guarantees égaliberté to all citizens, whatever their position within the said

civil-bourgeois society. And yet, contrary to the mystification conveyed by

the state, which claims that the citizen is the truth of the man, the reverse

is true, according to Marx: ‘‘This man, the member of civil society, is thus

the basis, the precondition, of the political state.’’26 This amounts to saying,

turned around, that the citizen, the ideality proclaimed by the Declaration,

is the projection of profane man, devoted to the materialism of bourgeois

society, who thenceforth appears as the naturalman. Society reproduces the

Heaven/Earth duality that characterizes Christianity (the bearer, and even

‘‘inventor’’ of universalism, thanks to the figure of Paul). Politics, the kind

defined by the abstraction of the citizen, is then revealed to be the true reli-

gion, the secularized transcendence, of modern society.

But this is not what is essential. Instead, what this notion of abstraction

highlights above all is that the ‘‘political revolution’’—the very one that con-

stitutes, ‘‘by one and the same act,’’ the political state and the atomized indi-

viduals who are qualified as citizens of right—‘‘resolves’’ ‘‘civil life into its

component parts, without revolutionising these components themselves or

subjecting them to criticism.’’27And this is true because, asMarx continues,

these elements are the ‘‘basis of its existence,’’ but a basis that it, precisely,abstracts to constitute the political state.

28That state is thus incapable of act-

ing on the socioeconomic presuppositions that appear to it thenceforth as

a natural reality, as a ‘‘precondition not requiring further substantiation.’’29

The state claims to dominate, and even transcend, this reality even though

the state is in fact dominated by it and condemned to reproduce its consti-

tutive separations.

This, according to Marx, is in any case the solution to the ‘‘enigma of the

Terror,’’ that is, the limits of the Jacobin-Robespierrian effort to resolve the

antagonism of bourgeois society (which, let us not forget, was considered

the model to follow by the great majority of revolutionary currents of his

era and even after, especially those inspired by Gracchus Babeuf ). It is pre-

cisely because the objectives of the Jacobin leadership went beyond abstrac-

tion and simply juridical equality that they collided, in themost exacerbated

fashion, with the limits of a politics cut off from its conditions, mobiliz-

ing all its energy in an effort to act on these conditions from a position of

irreducible exteriority.30 Out of the Jacobin failure, reconsidered in its full

amplitude, to carry the movement for political emancipation beyond itself

arises then the need for a new emancipatory horizon, without which society

will regress into ineffective, historically obsolete forms of universality.

714 Stathis Kouvélakis

This is why what is habitually designated as ‘‘the expansion of citizen-

ship,’’ as ‘‘the political emancipation’’ of those who have been excluded (or

at least a significant portion thereof: we are still waiting for civil rights to

be extended to that part of the proletariat designated, or rather ‘‘reified,’’ as

‘‘immigrants’’) does not mean a simple broadening of ‘‘rights’’ but a pro-

found transformation of the relations between the political and the non-

political, the ‘‘private’’ and the ‘‘public.’’31The access of working-class people

(men only at first) to suffrage is indissociable from the (very partial) pro-

cess of ‘‘decommodification’’ of their status as ‘‘force of labor,’’ of recognition

of the workplace as a ‘‘political’’ place (or at least as a legitimate place for

the collective organization of working-class people), and even of a kind of

‘‘socialization’’ of state institutions themselves (through the certainly quite

bureaucratized forms of ‘‘neocorporatist’’management linked to the forma-

tion of the ‘‘welfare state’’). Women’s right to vote is similarly inseparable

from a profound transformation of the ‘‘space of the family,’’ and from a rec-

ognition (again, partial) of its public/political character, especially through

women’s entry into the realm of production, the assumption by the state

of a number of functions connected to the sphere of reproduction (schools,

child-care centers, elder care, etc.) or the right to contraception. In short,

if there has been an ‘‘extension’’ of citizenship, this has been as a very con-

dition of its ‘‘disabstractification,’’ of the extension of the sphere of politics

itself, of the reexamination, under the effect of struggles by classes and

dominated groups, under the effect of the separations of civil-bourgeois

society. It becomes possible, in any case, to better understand why, accord-

ing to Marx, this process of politicization, if it crosses a decisive threshold

and challenges anew the very presuppositions of bourgeois society (the rela-

tions of property and production, to use Marxian language that postdates

this text), must undertake to surpass the ‘‘merely’’ political state, and the

abstraction of the citizen with it, especially as the foundational moment

of right.

The Critique of Right

The preceding critiques could be considered as ‘‘soluble’’ in the internal dia-

lectics of the founding utterances of citizenship, if they did not lead, and in

return even suppose, a critique of their very form, as founding utterancesof right (and, in a sense, of law). Right only exists, from Marx’s point of

view, in the act that constitutes the abstract political state and civil bourgeois

For a Rereading of On the Jewish Question 715

society, the latter decomposed into independent individuals, freed from the

traditional, personal bonds of the feudal era. Right thus only exists after the

schism that it expresses, or translates, just as religion expressed and trans-

lated the old unity that connected the diverse spheres of activity of the feudal

world.This translation, we should specify, operates in a ‘‘language’’—to bor-

row a key term from the analysis of right in The German Ideology32—that

assumes itself as foundational and arises in denial of the schism to which

it nonetheless owes its existence. This amounts to saying that right, and

its declaration, did not come first (contrary to their own pretensions). They

are the effect of a process that dissolves a directly political social form and

makes possible ‘‘by one and the same act’’ the existence of unbound indi-

viduals, as well as their recognition by the political state as legitimate legal

subjects, a recognition inscribed in the rights of man and of the citizen.33

The problem Marx poses is therefore not that the rights of man and the

citizen are formal but that they are rights, to borrow the trenchant formu-

lation of Bertrand Binoche.34As such they are absolutely real: I can very

well be both a believer and a citizen, just as the modern state can very well

eliminate the restricted franchise, thereby removing all directly political sig-

nificance from property, effectively guaranteeing the right to vote to those

who do not own property, and yet leave intact even the most concentrated

ownership of property, since property is now ‘‘merely’’ a civil difference.Or,

to give a more contemporary example, I can very well be a black South Afri-

can, with the right to vote in postapartheid South Africa (a right won at the

cost of blood), and live in the same township as before and work under the

orders of the same white boss. It remains to be seen, of course, how South

African capital, in the long term, can manage and assure the reproduction

of a force of labor freed from under the ‘‘iron heel’’ of apartheid.

An obvious objection nevertheless arises here: If the ‘‘rights’’ of man

and of the citizen are real rights, and if the ‘‘extension’’ of citizenship has

‘‘enriched’’ men and citizens with a whole series of ‘‘social rights,’’ has not

Marx’s objection as to the insurmountable limits of right been invalidated

‘‘practically’’ by the historical evolution (which we can even admit is, at least

largely, due to the effects of his critique)? And, in this case, rather than

abandoning the reference to the rights of man, would it not be more appro-

priate to seize it in order to redefine the content of those rights? Several

remarks are necessary on this point.We should remember first of all that,

in this text, Marx speaks of the rights of man only in the sense that they

differ from the rights of the citizen, of the foundational core of the ‘‘natu-

716 Stathis Kouvélakis

ral’’ and ‘‘unconditional rights’’ of man, structured, still according to Marx,

around the right to property. Now, it must be acknowledged that, whatever

the reworkings and ‘‘enrichments’’ of the founding declaration, manifest in

the numerous rewritings and revisions that succeeded it, the primacy of the

right to property was never questioned. Quite the contrary, it is the prop-

erty right that accounts (at the level of positive right) for the discrepancies,

hierarchies, and asymmetries henceforth inscribed in the order of ‘‘rights.’’

Rather than being linear extensions of the notion of ‘‘right,’’ the different

‘‘social’’ rights, because they cannot, precisely, be legally defined in themode

of the property right and its corollaries (as somany individual rights that can

be opposed to a specific ‘‘debtor’’), but only as ‘‘claims on the collectivity,’’

opposable to everyone and no one in particular (if not public power, that is,

the state), turn out to depend on political determinations and thus cannot

claim the same legal status as other rights. This is why they can be drasti-

cally limited, even eliminated, according to circumstances (such as the cur-

rent neoliberal counterreform), in a completely ‘‘legal’’ fashion compatible

with existing juridical and constitutional order. For purposes of compari-

son, consider the decision to seize an owner’s property without compen-

sation, which entails a radical overturning of juridical order, a break with

legality, and the shift to an ‘‘exceptional’’ political logic that openly deter-

mines the legal norms. An asymmetry internal to ‘‘rights’’ is revealed here,

partially covered over again by the homogenizing effects of juridical lan-

guage, which allows liberal theoreticians to establish a hierarchy that only

grants ‘‘rights-claims’’ a secondary place (or even no place at all, as in the

work of Friedrich Hayek) to ‘‘freedom rights,’’ even while it can be easily

seen that the former will degenerate into pure formalities without the sup-

port of the latter (to be checked in the work of the inventor of the distinction

of these two forms of rights, Isaiah Berlin in On Liberty).The extreme case, from this point of view, is obviously that of the ‘‘right

to work,’’ the demand for which, during the 1848 revolution in France,

made the limits of right readily apparent. For, at the outset, any attempt

to define this right makes its incompatibility with bourgeois society’s rela-

tions of property and exchange clearly perceptible.This is why, according to

Marx, ‘‘behind this right’’ lay the ‘‘revolutionary demands of the Paris prole-

tariat,’’35demands that could not be reduced to the language of right and of

rights. Later proclaimed in texts such as theUnitedNations’ 1948Universal

Declaration of Human Rights, the ‘‘right to work’’ has only been translated

concretely (and fragilely at that, as we can see today) as the ‘‘right to employ-

ment,’’36that is, de facto (including in the sense of positive right), as the

For a Rereading of On the Jewish Question 717

right to compensation in case of job loss.37This ‘‘right,’’ even in such a lim-

ited form, is in danger of rapidly becoming a mere memory, including in

countries with strong traditions of the ‘‘welfare state.’’

It is therefore not a question of abandoning the field of right (struggles

in the realm of right and for rights are constitutive dimensions of class

struggle) but of determining its limits. We must see that the struggles of

dominated peoples, even when they are expressed in terms of right and

rights, exceed right; they speak, in the final analysis, of something else.

‘‘Political emancipation’’ differs from ‘‘human emancipation,’’ to use the

terms ofOn the Jewish Question (Marx would soon speak only of ‘‘the emanci-pation of the proletariat’’)38 to the extent that human emancipation requires

not realizing right, or denouncing it, but breaking with the foundational

claims that are simply the fictive reverse of its function of legitimating a

state power separated from society.

The point of view of ‘‘human emancipation’’ thinks from the internallimits of political emancipation, that is, from its own failure. Political eman-

cipation is, for Marx, a ‘‘big step forward’’; it is not the final ‘‘form of human

emancipation,’’ but it remains ‘‘the final form of human emancipation

within the hitherto existing world order,’’ the ‘‘partial emancipation’’ that

‘‘leaves the pillars of the house intact.’’39Its failure thus seems retrospec-

tively necessary, in the new perspective of emancipation that attacks both

the pillars and the roof of the existing order.To put this anotherway, political

emancipation is no more an illusion than it is a strictly functional mecha-

nism of bourgeois domination;40it is simply—if I may say so!—weighted

down41by an internal, structural limit that prevents it from answering the

question towhich it leads (by its very ‘‘failing’’), that of the advent of concrete

universality.

Beyond Citizenship: Revolution

This internal limit, in my view, has also made it impossible to account for

the historic process of access to ‘‘political emancipation’’ as an ‘‘extension’’ of

citizenship; instead, this process appears as a subversion of the very notion.

In a way, the ‘‘emphatic’’ return of citizenship that we are witnessing attests

to the crisis that the process is undergoing, or rather, it shows that this crisis

is taking a new form. The movement (to continue using this terminology)

of the ‘‘extension’’ and ‘‘concretization’’ of citizenship, in the framework of

compromises imposed by class struggles,42was followed by an era of ‘‘cold’’

counterrevolution, a profound movement of disemancipation put forward

718 Stathis Kouvélakis

by neoliberalism. The exclusion of the dominated classes from the public

sphere (indissociable from the destruction of the social conquests of the pre-

vious period), and even from the exercise of their right to vote (witness the

collapse of the turnout in the main European countries and these nations’

underlying alignment with the U.S. model), that is, the de facto reestab-

lishment of the restricted franchise and of passive citizenship, represents

a decisive dimension of this. We thus have proof, if proof were needed, of

the unstable and (spatially and temporally) limited character of compro-

mises currently—that is, retrospectively—interpreted (and often idealized)

as ‘‘social citizenship.’’

If this is true, the current proliferation of the ‘‘citizen’’ discourse, which

contrasts sharply with its relative effacement in a preceding period none-

thelessmarked by the ‘‘advances’’ of ‘‘citizenship’’ (essentially expressed, we

should say, by the discourses of socialism and of the anticolonial revolu-

tion), far from being a paradox, must be seen as a symptom (albeit am-

biguous) of disemancipation. Sometimes a protest against certain of dis-

emancipation’s effects (in the name of ‘‘qualitative’’ or ‘‘social’’ dimensions

incorporated into the definition of ‘‘citizenship’’), sometimes a justifica-

tion of that process’s overall logic (in the name of a return to the virtues

of abstract universalism), the figure of the ‘‘citizen’’ celebrated everywhere

today accelerates the disemancipating process on the discursive plane by

excluding the only critique that radically calls its presuppositions into ques-

tion, that is, the socialist and communist critique.

Perhaps we can now better understand the reach of the Marxian critique

of citizenship. For one can restate ‘‘égaliberté’’ and ‘‘citizenship’’ as often

as one likes, but one will never thereby obtain the ‘‘transformation of the

relations of production,’’ ‘‘seizure of power,’’ ‘‘abolition of wage labor, of the

market, and of classes,’’ or the ‘‘withering away of the state.’’ Naturally, one

might judge that, from the very point of view of an emancipating project,

these objectives are quite outdated, even dangerous or at least harmful; but

to do this, it seems to me that one first has to discuss them seriously, con-

fronting their radical nature and making sure that abandoning them will

not entail a serious weakening of the project. Just as it would be illusory to

believe that Marx’s theory can avoid confrontation with the defeats of the

past century, it is essential that we understand the meaning of the resis-

tances that his theory continues, and will continue, to inspire.

Translated by Alex Martin

For a Rereading of On the Jewish Question 719

Notes

1 Hegel’s preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit.2 On this point, I refer the reader to the excellent synthesis of G. Bensusan, ‘‘Question

juive,’’ in Dictionnaire critique du marxisme, ed. G. Labica and G. Bensusan, new ed.

(Paris, 2003).

3 Thus the title Marx gave his text was Zur Judenfrage: ‘‘On [or ‘‘About’’] the Jewish Ques-tion,’’ and not simply ‘‘The Jewish Question,’’ as it is often translated erroneously.

4 That is, in addition to On the Jewish Question, the introduction to the Contribution to theCritique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. It would also be appropriate to include in this listMarx’s letters to Arnold Ruge.

5 Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question (hereafter JQ), in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: CollectedWorks, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 162. Unless otherwise stated,

emphasis in all quotes is in the original. For the original German, seeMarx EngelsWerke,vol. 1 (hereafterMEW 1), 363–64.

6 This primacy of property has repercussions at the level of positive right, which accords

to the right of property guarantees unknown to others, and especially ‘‘social’’ rights (we

will return to this).

7 JQ 164,MEW 1:366.

8 JQ 163, 1:365. Even Rousseau (as Marx emphasizes later in On the Jewish Question),despite his conception of a ‘‘civil liberty’’ that entails not the loss of ‘‘natural liberty’’ but

rather the production of a new freedom based on the entire alienation of the individual

forces of all those who found the political association, remains a prisoner of this model

of liberty-independence.

9 This suspicion nonetheless remains that this ‘‘essence’’ itself functions on the mode of a

nature, of an original given altered by the atomism of bourgeois society, which ‘‘human

emancipation’’ serves to reestablish. These ambiguities led Marx later (in the sixth thesis

on Feuerbach) to repudiate explicitly the concept of ‘‘species’’ and of ‘‘generic essence’’

as ‘‘internal, mute universality binding the numerous individuals in a natural fashion’’

(from Karl Marx: Les thèses sur Feuerbach, ed. G. Labica [Paris: Presses Universitaires deFrance, 1897], 22).

10 JQ 167,MEW 1:369.

11 ‘‘Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as

an individual human being has become a species-being [Gattungswesen geworden ist] in hiseveryday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has

recognised and organised his ‘forces propres’ as social forces, and consequently no longerseparates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human

emancipation have been accomplished.’’ JQ 168,MEW 1:365.

12 On this question, see D. Losurdo, ‘‘Marx: La tradition libérale et le concept universel de

l’homme,’’ Actuel Marx, no. 5 (1989): 17–31; and Losurdo, ‘‘La construction du concept

universel de l’homme: De la tradition libérale à la Révolution française,’’ in La philosophieet la Révolution française, ed. B. Bourgeois and J. d’Hondt (Paris: Vrin, 1993), 49–58.

13 Cf. C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). On the political (and foundational) implica-

tions of Lockean anthropology, see Neal Wood, The Politics of Locke’s Philosophy: A Social

720 Stathis Kouvélakis

Study of ‘‘An Essay Concerning Human Understanding’’ (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1983).

14 Quoted in R. Zapperi, introduction to E. Sieyès,Qu’est-ce que le Tiers Etat? (Geneva: Droz,1970), 46. Sieyès even envisaged, in absolute seriousness, the perfection, through suc-

cessive crossings, of a new ‘‘race’’ of ‘‘anthropomorphic monkeys’’ destined to be ‘‘slaves,’’

alongside the race of ‘‘negroes,’’ serving as ‘‘auxiliary instruments of labor,’’ and of a ‘‘race’’

of ‘‘chiefs of production,’’ composed exclusively of ‘‘whites’’ (ibid., 11).

15 B. Constant, Principes de politique (Paris: Hachette, 1997), 179.16 Cf. G. Fraisse,Muse de la Raison: Démocratie et exclusion des femmes en France (Paris: Gal-

limard, 1995). Fraisse correctly emphasizes that ‘‘it can be said that equality is true in

theory and false in practice, but the procedure is in fact more perverse, because theory

itself bears inequality, the possibility of subordinating women’’ (286); she concludes that

‘‘the Declaration of the Rights of Man is not contradictory with exclusion’’ (330).

17 A. Tosel,Démocratie et liberalismes (Paris: Kimé, 1995), 20–26. This principle is ‘‘hidden’’

not because the utterances of the exclusion remain implicit (on the contrary, we have

seen that they are clearly affirmed) but because they are situated at another level of thediscourse, one that is more ‘‘empirical,’’ or ‘‘concrete,’’ leaving formally intact the primary

utterance that was supposed to ‘‘subsume’’ them from the heights of its impassive univer-

sality. Thus the fragmented, proliferating, and finally instable character of this particular

type of utterance.

18 Like the relationships of filiation in feudal society, the exclusion of women and the

‘‘racization’’ of proletarians show that the ‘‘naturalization’’ of relationships of domination

is displaced and reformulated in the terms of anthropological difference.

19 See esp. ‘‘Sur le lieu commun: Il se peut que ce soit juste en théorie, mais, en pratique,

cela ne vaut point,’’ in E. Kant, Oeuvres philosophiques, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), cf.

esp. 275–78, an eloquent plea for the exclusion from citizenship of women, minors, and

all those who sell their force of labor (operaii).20 See, e.g., E. Laclau’s argument in Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996).21 Cf. D. Losurdo,Démocratie ou bonapartisme (Paris: Temps des Cerises, 2003), 25–27; and,

for women, Fraisse,Muse de la Raison, 275–76.22 Losurdo, Démocratie ou bonapartisme.23 ‘‘The political revolution thereby abolished [hob . . . auf ] the political character of civil society

[bürgerliche Gesellschaft]. It broke up civil society into its simple component parts; on the

one hand, the individuals; on the other hand, the material and spiritual elements consti-tuting the content of the life and civil position of these individuals.’’ JQ 166,MEW 1:368.

24 E.g., like the abstract universal of ‘‘republican laicity’’ that today is wielded against ‘‘com-

munitarian particularisms,’’ andwhich reveals itself to be the true particularism, one that

affirms a ‘‘national’’ identity, openly exclusive since it is built on the massive repression

of the colonial fact and of the racial discrimination experienced daily by entire sectors of

French society.

25 J. Rancière suggestively renders this dialectic of the universal by defining the political

as an ‘‘institution on behalf of those with no share’’ [institution de la part des sans part],whose irruption reveals the contingency of any social order (themanagement, the count-

ing, of which defines the ‘‘police’’ for Rancière) that affirms itself as the all, the singular

universal that is born, in the polemical mode, of the fundamental wrong, the exclusion of

For a Rereading of On the Jewish Question 721

the ‘‘uncounted.’’ Cf. Rancière, La mésentente (Paris: Galilée, 1995). No doubt, but on thecondition that we not oppose (as Rancière does) symbolic exclusion and social determina-

tions—or, in other words, ‘‘politics’’ and ‘‘police’’—in order to illuminate the ‘‘politicity’’

of the ‘‘police’’ itself.

26 JQ 167,MEW 1:369.

27 Ibid.

28 ‘‘Far from eliminating these artificial differences [the political state] only exists through

their presuppositions’’; JQ 153,MEW 1:354.

29 JQ 167,MEW 1:369.

30 Cf. JQ 156,MEW 1:357.

31 It also entails a transformation of the ‘‘rights’’ in question, as we will return to later.

32 K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: CollectedWorks, vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 320.

33 ‘‘The establishment of the political state and the dissolution of civil society into indepen-

dent individuals—whose relations with one another depend on law, just as the relationsofmen in the system of estates and guilds depended on privilege—is accomplished by oneand the same act.’’ JQ 167,MEW 1:369.

34 B. Binoche,Critiques des droits de l’homme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989),111.

35 Cf. K. Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850, in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Col-lected Works, vol. 10 (NewYork: International Publishers, 1975), 77–78. ‘‘Behind the right

to work stands power over capital; behind the power over capital, the appropriation of the

means of production, their subordination to the associated working class and, therefore,

the elimination of wage labor, of capital and of their mutual relations. Behind the ‘rightto work’ stood the June insurrection’’ (78).

36 Contrary to what is often claimed, it is under this formulation that the right to work fig-

ures in the preamble to the French constitution of 1946, confirmed in 1958, where it

appears, furthermore, not as an unconditional right but as counterweight to the ‘‘duty’’

to work.

37 Cf. J.-J. Goblot, Le droit au travail: Passé, présent, avenir (Paris: Syllepse, 2003).38 E.g., in Class Struggles in France: ‘‘The secret of the revolution of the nineteenth century’’

is ‘‘the emancipation of the proletariat’’ (10:57).39 JQ 155,MEW 1:356 (my emphasis); Marx, introduction toCritique de la philosophie de droit

de Hegel, trans. E. Kouvélakis (Paris: Ellipses, 2000), 16, 18,MEW 1:388, 389.

40 This is S. Petrucciani’s objection in his stimulating study ‘‘Marx et la critique de l’égalité

politique,’’ Actuel Marx, no. 8 (1990): 67–86.41 Behind the original past participle grevée lies a pun on the noun grève (strike). Trans.42 We should stress the extent to which these compromises were indebted to October 1917,

including from the strict point of view of ‘‘political emancipation’’: Soviet Russia was

the first nation to recognize simultaneously the political rights of those who do not own

property, of women, and of oppressed nationalities.